MUSIC VIEW

MUSIC VIEW; Paine and Chadwick Return to Favor

By John Rockwell

Published: January 15, 1989

Fashion can catch us up in the excitement of the moment, lending a surge of energy to contemporary artworks. But fashion can be cruel, too, and nowhere is it crueler than in the consignment of once-honorable, once-popular composers to oblivion.

No composers were consigned to that status more summarily than the leaders of what are known as the First and Second New England Schools of American symphonists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In their day, these men were the heroes and arbiters of refined American musical taste. Then, abrubtly and decisively, they were forgotten, except by a few scholars - not all of whom seemed the most steadfast of champions - and so they remained for decades.

But in the last few years, these composers have made a stirring comeback, and two recent events have highlighted the leaders of the first and second schools. This week, John Knowles Paine (1839-1906), the most notable figure of the First New England School, is having his ''As You Like It'' Overture (1876) and Symphony No. 1 in C minor (1875) performed by Zubin Mehta and the New York Philharmonic at Avery Fisher. On records, the five string quartets and Piano Quintet of George W. Chadwick (1854-1931), the leader of the Second New England School, have just been released by Northeastern Records in a series of three compact disks.

Why were these men forgotten and why are they being remembered today? One reason for their neglect involves one generation's almost inevitable dismissal of its predecessors. Paine and Chadwick enjoyed great success in their day, especially in their home base of Boston, and because of their triumphs there, throughout the young Republic. Paine was championed by John Sullivan Dwight, whose Journal of Music was the most influential American publication of its type in the 19th century.

But the two composers' domination of musical life during their time, and their direct influence on their successors - Paine was the first professor of music at an American university (Harvard) and Chadwick lifted the New England Conservatory of Music to eminence - provoked an inevitable generational reaction.

That reaction was reinforced by politics, international and artistic. Paine and Chadwick, like most educated American composers of their time, were German-trained, Paine in Berlin and Chadwick in Leipzig and Munich. World War I set in motion a sharp anti-German reaction. Karl Muck was driven from his post as music director of the Boston Symphony, and Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson and others began a trend in the 1920's when American composers began to be trained in Paris, not Germany.

These American Francophiles were also Americanists, dedicated to the establishment of an indigenously American symphonic style. They joined forces with such American originals as Charles Ives to create the American vanguard of the 20's, 30's and beyond.

These modernists had a vested interest in denigrating the composers who preceded them. They did so on stylistic grounds, dismissing Paine and Chadwick and the rest as hopeless academic slaves to Brahmsian rules. And they did so personally, portraying their own Americanisms as genuine and those of Chadwick and Edward MacDowell and others as naively, fatally Europeanized. The result was the establishment of an orthodoxy that has still not been decisively overthrown. Even the authors of the entry on Paine in the recent New Grove Dictionary of American Music -both scholarly experts on Paine - sound positively patronizing. For them, Paine's career was marked by careerist calculation and facile imitation.

But more and more, scholars and musicians are changing their minds about both men's music. One reason is that generational passions have cooled: There's no one left today who would be threatened by serious attention paid to Paine and Chadwick. Another reason is the neoconservative, neo-Romantic cultural climate in which we now flourish. Most of that energy is being directed to the later ''lost generation'' of American symphonists swept from favor by the fiercer, weirder modernists and post-modernists of the 1950's and 60's. But in the course of the rediscovery of the music of William Schuman, Samuel Barber, Ned Rorem and their peers, a sort of spillover favor is being accorded their predecessors.

This effort has been furthered by increasing historicization of our international musical culture, and the proliferation of national organizations like the Institute for Studies in American Music at Brooklyn College, the Sonneck Society and New World Records, all devoted to reclaiming America's musical past.

The links between government grant-giving bodies, musicologists, recording companies and performing groups is nowhere better revealed than in the Philharmonic's recent attention to Paine. Mr. Mehta may be sincerely enthusiastic about this music, but his New World recording of the Paine Symphony No. 2 in A (NW 350) came about after subsidies from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts and Francis Goelet, a supporter of venturesome Philharmonic projects. And this week's Paine, which New World will also record, is backed by the same consortium.

How much of this musical archeology serves merely documentary ends, and to what extent will it restore Paine and Chadwick to the working repertories of modern symphony orchestras? That remains to be seen (and heard). But at the very least, this pleasing, well-crafted, warmly accessible music should appeal to modern symphony audiences. And its presence on our programs and in our record stores will go a long way toward establishing the verity that 20th-century American composition didn't spring from an abject musical wasteland.